Mail locates bottom of barrel, gives it a good scraping

I'm out of the country for a year or so. I'm somewhere nice and sunny - it's 30C outside right now - and really should be seeing the sights, sipping coconuts, that sort of thing. But instead, like a moth to a flame, I find myself drawn to the pages of Mail Online. I just can't help it. Maybe I have some kind of mental problem. And despite not having visited it for three whole weeks, within roughly six seconds of my return to intellectual masochism I'd stumbled across something that made me decide to break my self-imposed blogging moratorium. After I'd banged my head repeatedly against the laptop, obviously.

Now you don't have to have been at this tabloid-watching malarky very long to see a headline like that and instantly think "What are the chances that said ban ISN'T down to health and safety - or even the childish cloacaism that is 'Elf N Safety', something that surely has no place in a serious news story?" And were you to think that, you would of course be entirely correct. In the intro, lazy hack Nick Fagge, perhaps jealous of colleague Steve Doughty's 5CC tabloid bullshit of the month award, makes this bold claim:

Every year the Christians from different churches get together to march a 400-yard route to celebrate Easter. But this year their Good Friday parade has been banned – because it breaches health and safety laws.

This being a Mail health and safety story, Nick is legally required to undermine his own argument within the next few paragraphs. Hence these two sentences:

Previously organisers of the parade in Willesden, north London, had only needed to inform police of their route. But new red tape means they now need permission from Brent Council. Officials said they banned the procession because they were contacted too late to carry out a ‘consultation’ to close the roads.

And just in case you failed to understand that, there’s a handy quote from a council spokesman that spells it out extremely clearly (tucked away at the end of the article, natch):

“Brent Council was not contacted about the march until around a week ago. There is a strict legal procedure we have to follow to issue a traffic order closing roads so people can march in the highway, which includes advertising and consultation, and this takes about five weeks. We are very sorry to say there is now not enough time for us to legally facilitate this march.”

So it’s got nowt to do with health and safety at all – the council simply has rules requiring five weeks advance notice of any planned road closures so that people not involved in an event have time to plan for the road closure. The Catholic priest in charge of the march failed to check with the council five weeks ahead (maybe he forgot when Easter was?) so the road can’t be closed. I suppose you could accuse the council of being a little officious and inflexible, but thems the rules. And they have nothing whatsoever to do with health and safety, despite what the sub claims in the headline and Fagge claims in his intro.

The Mail has been blaming health and safety for everything from stepping stone repair to the non-banning of secret santa to parking arrangements at cheese-rolling events for donkey’s years now, but what makes this story remarkable is the way the paper has elbowed in a second pet theme – Christians being persecuted by authority and treated worse than assorted minority groups. Normally this kind of story has at least a vague basis in fact. But this time round it comes entirely from the imagination of the priest who forgot to give five weeks notice to the council:

Father Hugh MacKenzie, of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church, said: “The rights of Christians are being overlooked in favour of the rights of Islamic groups and gay rights organisations.”

Wait, what?

“One does wonder whether if it was a homosexual rights or Islamic group the council would have been more flexible, as it doesn’t seem like rocket science to permit us to walk 400 metres. The rights of Christians are just not respected in Britain.”

Riiiiiight. The road won’t be closed because the priest failed to follow the rules, yet this is evidence of the rights of Christians not being respected in Britain? What rights are those then? The right to break the law? The right to be treated MORE favourably than other people who want to organise a road closure?

And is there any evidence that Brent Council has been more flexible with homosexual rights groups or Islamic groups? Anything to prove the claim that the rights of Christians are being overlooked in favour of such people? No, there’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the slightly unnerving ramblings of a disorganised priest. But hey, his outlandish claims chime with the Mail’s ongoing narrative about Christians being treated worse than the minority groups the paper loathes so much, so Nick duly sets out to come up with some rock-solid evidence supporting Father Hugh:

Brent Council hosts a Diwali street celebration every year. Last November it boasted it had held the biggest Diwali event in the country, after more than 60,000 people turned out.

And? Brent has huge a huge population of Sikhs and Hindus, so it’s not much of a shock that they hold a Diwali celebration. But how is this in any way related to the story? Did the council fail to advertise any associated road closures five weeks in advance? Or is the Mail just complaining because the council put on an event aimed primarily at brown people? Oh wait, there’s more:

And in July last year the council appealed to the Muslim community to notify it of any Eid events so it could promote them free of charge. But it did not do the same for other religious festivals.

OMFG! STOP THE PRESSES! Brent Council offered to promote festivities being staged by a minority group so that people from the majority, who may otherwise be unaware, could get involved! BUT THEY DIDN’T ADVERTISE CHRISTMAS!!!!!!! Which is a travesty, because, without the council telling people, NOBODY WOULD KNOW THAT CHRISTMAS WAS TAKING PLACE! Sure, they might be a little confused as to why all the shops were really busy, there were decorations up everywhere and they had two days of work, but without the council telling them what was going on they’d never have any idea that it was all related to an obscure little festival celebrated by a tiny religious group called “Christians”.

If Father Hugh wants to trot out tired lines about being part of a persecuted minority that’s his lookout, but if Nick Fagges wants to call himself a journalist and the Mail wants to call itself a newspaper, they have a duty to seriously investigate whether his claims have any substance. Who knows, maybe just yesterday a group of gay Muslims were given permission to close the M1 for three hours at the drop of a hat – if it happened, Father Hugh has a point and the story has some merit. But based on the facts provided by the Mail, it’s nothing but another attempt to win sympathy for Christians at the expense of other groups, something the Mail is all too happy to collude with. And based on some of the comments from readers, it certainly seems to be working:

Journalist can't abide people making money from the royal wedding, so gets paid to write 500 words about how awful it is

Mail columnist Sandra Parsons is displeased with the news that the company owned by Kate Middleton's parents is launching a "Royal Wedding scratchcard", prompting this moan:

"Yesterday, I went on to their Party Pieces website to have a closer look at the scratch cards. I typed 'royal wedding' into the search facility and up popped an entire menu of offerings, from 'royal wedding Kate' — which throws up 24 products — to 'royal wedding party products', which brings up a jaw-dropping 1,883 items, an endless array stretching from drink stirrers to invitation holders to cake boxes."

For the purposes of comparison, I typed "royal wedding kate" into the Daily Mail's search facility. I don't know if the 759 results it brought up counts as "jaw-dropping", but I do know that it's more than 30 times as many hits as the Middletons had on their site. The simple phrase "royal wedding" produces 2,679 hits on the Mail's site, which isn't so much jaw-dropping as jaw-falling-off-your-head-entirely-inducing.

And as for those 1,883 hits on "Royal wedding party products", is Parsons really that shocked given that the company in question sells party products, and that a lot of people buy party products for their own weddings? Further inspection suggests that the search engine is returning matches for ANY of the words, not ALL of them - which is why it turns up things like this:





Yes, those awful Middletons. Why can't they stop cashing in on their daughter's wedding with their clockwork train sets and their pink party shoes? I bet on the day of the wedding they'll even sink so low as to try and cash in by producing a 36-page full-colour souvenir supplement about the day...

Speechwatching II

Remember last year when I pointed out that Ed Miliband seemed to be drawing inspiration from JFK during his speech at the Labour conference? Well the speechwriter behind yesterday's David Cameron address also seemed to have read a few too many "Great Speeches of the 20th Century" books:

"From Aberconwy in the North, to the Vale of Glamorgan in the South.
From the mountains to the valleys.
The message rang out..."

Or, as Martin Luther King Jnr put it in 1963:

"And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California."

Of course, Dr King's speech was a plea for racial tolerance, equality and justice for all. Cameron's speech was a call for a "No" vote in the AV referendum.

Daily Mail headline of the year

For some reason Mail Online doesn't mention in the headline that one of those newspaper websites was Mail Online. Still, kudos to the Northcliffe House massive for actually running this story online, even if they have disabled reader comments "for legal reasons". The other guilty party, the Sun, hasn't found room for the news on its website.

When is a German not a German?

Yesterday a gunman in Frankfurt shot dead two American airmen as they boarded a bus outside the German city's airport. The Mail has, via German paper Die Welt, got hold of a picture of the prime suspect. Here's the headline:



So he's a Kosovan? Someone from Kosovo, right? Which is why the Mail also provides a handy little box-out explaining all about the way Kosovans in Kosovo keep getting recruited by terrorist groups:


But hidden away in the middle of the story is this factoid:

"Uka, whose family come from the northern town of Mitrovica, was born and educated in Germany where his family moved to some 40 years ago."

So this Kosovan Muslim was actually born and raised in Germany a mere two decades after his family arrived in the country.

At least the Mail is being consistent - the paper has previously suggested that second- and third-generation immigrants in this country are not actually British, hence the suggestion that its headline on 29 April should read "Immigrant's grandson marries unemployed woman, moves to lavish house paid for by YOU".

The Mail also has form on this issue in Germany. Ahead of England's catastrophically poor showing in the second round of the World Cup last summer, they came up with this little gem:

There was also a nice little graphic to explain just how foreign those cheating Krauts are:


Close reading shows that of the 11 "foreign" players, six were born in Germany. Boggle-eyed Mesut Ozil is included in the list of foreigners despite being born in Germany to German parents, because his folks "are of Turkish origin". The Mail never got around to claiming that Ashley Cole (father born in Barbados), Emile Heskey (mother from Barbuda, father from Antigua) and David James (father from Jamaica) were "foreigners"...

Littlejohn caught lying yet again

Today Richard Littlejohn turns his attention to the census, which isdue to take place later this year. First things first, he's not happy with the fact that it's available in languages other than English (presumably the Welsh can go fuck themselves):

"The form has also been printed in 57 different languages — including Twi, which is spoken in south Ghana; Sinhala, from Sri Lanka; and Tagalog, which is spoken by Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men."

This sentence annoys me on so many levels. I mean, if you're trying to get an accurate count of how many people there are in a country then surely it's sensisible to ensure everyone can understand the census form? Would Dickie prefer to know only how many English-speakers there are? Then there's the casual racism of the "Tagalog, which is spoken by Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men". Actually, Dickie, it's spoken by a third of the population of the Philippines - roughly 30 million people. But hey, it sounds funny, right? Like Bongo-bongo land?

Still, he's just giving his audience what it wants. The real issue is that once again Dickie has shown he can't make it through a whole column without using a rhetorical device. By which I mean lying:

The outrageously intrusive 2011 Census weighs a ton and runs to 32 pages. It demands information about everything from skin colour to sexual preference.

Except, of course, it doesn't. The Government and the Office for National Statistics have been quite clear that the census will not contain any questions about sexual orientation. Last year the Lesbian & Gay Foundation ran a petition to try and have such a question included, to which the Government responded:

“The Draft Census (England and Wales) Order 2009, setting out the question topics to be asked in the 2011 Census, has been approved by both Houses of Parliament and is now law. It does not include a question on sexual identity."

On the Today programme earlier this week John Humphries interviewed the man in charge of the census and asked why the Government needed to know whether he was straight or gay, and was firmly and clearly told that the census does not ask such a question.

But since when has Littlejohn let a simple thing like the facts get in the way of a good moan?

Tory MPs strangely quiet on THIS botched evacuation

It's Easter 2010. The sun is shining. The country is already bored to tears with the election campaign. Nick Clegg is about to become humungously popular thanks to the first televised debate between party leaders, and will go on to surf a huge wave of popular support for, ooh, about three weeks before becoming the Most Hated Man in Britain.

Meanwhile, the skies over Britain are empty of everything except birds and Icelandic volcanic ash. An estimated 150,000 Britons are stranded across Europe, struggling to get home via taxis, buses, bicycles and ferries. And the Tories are not happy. They think the Labour government has failed to get a grip on the situation and is not doing enough to get stranded Brits home. Shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers has a lot to say about the issue:

"Those who are stranded abroad need reassurance from the Government that they are doing all they can to help get people home and address the crisis."

"Stranded Britons abroad need a clear assurance from the Government that there is a strategy in place to help them and bring them home, but a number of issues are not clear and we have not had a detailed public statement from ministers [for two days] ... clarity from Gordon Brown and his ministers is essential ... How many British citizens are stranded overseas? Where are they stranded? How many days does the govt estimate it will take them to return home?"

"We saw real concerns with the government's lack of action in terms of taking action to rescue people while the skies were closed. It took them far too long to get their act together on that. We need to ask some searching questions about the judgments made by the government."

"People stranded abroad need to know all that can be done to help them is being done."

Tobias Ellwood, then shadow tourism minister, accused the government of "dithering" in its duty to help citizens stranded abroad.

Fast forward just under 12 months, and instead of volcanic ash there's a cloud of protest and revolution settling across north Africa.

Things are really kicking off in Libya, where around 500 British citizens live. Many other European countries evacuated their people as soon as the fighting broke out, but Britain's response has been less than efficient - so much so that David Cameron has felt the need to apologise and the Daily Mail has branded the whole situation "a farce". Things are so bad that even Richard Littlejohn feels able to criticise the state of affairs.

The ash cloud closed airspace for six days and left up to 150,000 people stranded. It is now seven days since the first protests began in Libya, creating a need to evacuate up to 500 people, but Theresa Villiers and Tobias Ellwood have yet to complain about the PM failing to act quickly enough to help stranded Britons. Could it be that they've realised being in government isn't as easy as it looks from the outside?